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The Glimpse of a Better World on a Snow Day

February 16, 2014 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Snow. Snow. More snow.

Disasters can bring out the best in people, but our wintry circumstances here in The City That Loves You Back have not gotten that bad yet.

We’ve not had that much snow in Philadelphia.

But while “record-breaking” exaggerates our hardship, there have certainly been kindnesses and conversations that would not have occurred without our almost daily 3, 6 or 12 inches. Unfortunately, glimmers of community are less apparent than the impatience and irritability that have begun to feel like a tantrum.

It’s probably been more encouraging in pockets where snowy conditions produced clearer disasters. For example, where a cohort of drivers, thrown together by chance and icy roads, responds to their shared misfortune by helping one another, sharing their water, groceries and first aid kits, and finding a laugh in what they could not change.

Did the drivers in all those cars and trucks below just sit tight and assume the authorities would come and straighten everything out?  How long do you think it took them to turn to one another for a helping hand and camaraderie during the slow sorting out?

crash 634x423
100 Vehicle Pile-up on PA Turnpike near Philadelphia on February 14

 

In A Paradise Built in Hell: the Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, Rebecca Solnit looked into natural and man-made catastrophes like the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina and found remarkable evidence of community re-building by victims from every station in life. Her argument is that “in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.” People rise to the occasion and become more generous, more enterprising and (paradoxically) more light-hearted than they were before.

For example, Solnit recounts dozens of individual stories after the 9/11 attacks, including that of Tobin James Mueller, who starts a single table donut dispensary for aid workers that expands dramatically into a way station for hundreds of firemen and ambulance workers on Pier 59 over the ensuing days.

Everyone here was rejected by the city’s official [emergency relief] sites.  I accept anyone who wants to help and anything anyone wants to donate. We find a place for everything and everyone.  A hopeful would-be volunteer comes up to me and asks if there is anything she can do.  I give her a task, and that’s the last direction I need to give. Each volunteer becomes a self-motivated powerhouse who does whatever it takes to get the job done. Then they find a hundred more jobs to do.  There is so much to do.  It’s so much fun to participate in.  I forget to sleep.  Many of my volunteers have been working for over 36 hours.  It is difficult to bring oneself to go back home.  The thought of closing my eyes makes me tremble.

The people Solnit celebrates in A Paradise Build in Hell are not “nasty and brutish and short” and in need of managing by official society. Overwhelmingly, they are people who know perfectly well how to act when the social order has ground to a halt and they are free to rely on their resourcefulness and shared humanity.

Time and again, in post-disaster zones, she finds that it is representatives of the broken social order (such as the police and the military) who resort to violence because of their erroneous assumption that victims will quickly devolve into savages once society’s “safeguards” are removed. Solnit’s message throughout is that nothing could be farther from the truth. In philosopher William James’ observation during the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake: “energies slumbering” are awakened, and suffering and loss are transformed when they become shared experiences.

On this snow day, the questions are really quite simple.

-Why can’t problem solving in our everyday communities be more satisfying, resourceful, engaged and light-hearted, so that “disasters can just be disasters” and not the random opportunities for liberation that they are today?

-Why don’t our fleeting experiences of a better world after disaster give us the confidence to come together and build a more humane society?

-Why didn’t the solidarity so many of us experienced after 9/11, Hurricane Sandy, the terrorism at the Boston Marathon or the massacre of first graders in Newtown have a more permanent half-life?

-Why do we revert so readily to fear instead of to trust?

It is the middle of February. There hasn’t been enough snow in Philadelphia yet.

But we still have a few weeks left.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Work & Life Rewards Tagged With: collaboration, community, disaster, fear, paradise, problem solving, trust, utopia

Thinking With Your Hands

November 10, 2013 By David Griesing 3 Comments

Drawing reduces what you’re seeing to its essentials.

It can be what you’re looking at, or what your mind’s eye is trying to visualize. Putting what you’re seeing down on the page may be like photography (aiming at accuracy) or like poetry (capturing the feeling of the moment).

Drawing has a different objective when you’re trying to “think though” a problem. Then it can be a tool for arriving at place that’s totally new.

LEONARDO DA VINCI-THINKING ABOUT FLYING

Drawing is essentially shorthand. It has been described as low vs. high definition. Drawing generalizes and leaves the specifics until later, that is, until you’ve gotten the basics right—which is usually the hard part of creative thinking.

To draw is often a solitary act, between your thoughts, your eyes, and your hands, holding the paper while you’re making marks on it. Drawing yields its best rewards when it’s like this, a low instead of high tech endeavor. A screen or tablet introduces complexity, requiring the manipulation of software, a mouse or stylus. Hand drawing is at its simplest & more direct when it’s just you, a pencil and a piece of paper.

(Of course, this kind of drawing also gives you the singular satisfaction of crumpling up your mistakes, and hurling them away before starting over again. Nothing you can do on a screen lets you start over with that kind of flourish!)

The directness & simplicity of sketching out your ideas has additional power as a vehicle for collaboration. Its shorthand often suggests different ways of completing what you’ve jotted down. Your specifics don’t get in the way, inviting other people into your thought process to modify the essentials.

Drawing your ideas on a whiteboard (instead of a piece of paper) may be the optimal way to invite others into the creative process. In fact, as a tool for innovation the whiteboard is hard to beat. One technology reporter, Farhad Manjoo, has noted their ubiquity in our so-called “cradle of innovation,” Silicon Valley.

Whiteboards reward bigness: Because you’ve got to draw objects large enough for everyone to see, and because dry-erase markers are too fat to allow you to write too much text, the whiteboard encourages thinking about the highest levels of an idea, and it discourages getting lost in details.

In a recent video interview, Manjoo elaborates on the role that the whiteboard plays, even at companies whose business is preserving your handwritten notes and drawings on-line, such as Evernote.

Some of our earliest tool-based memories are often of drawing with crayons in a coloring book or with a piece of chalk on a blackboard. These competencies, repeated over & over again as children, created neural pathways (see Daniel Coyle in The Talent Code) as we first learned how to visualize our thoughts. When you pick up a pencil or marker and start to draw out your thoughts, you are tapping into a basic aptitude that is, in a sense, “hardwired” into almost all of us.

I was reminded of the power that drawing can unleash in all creative activities while reading a recent post by Laura Busche. Wanting to know why the act of sketching her ideas has such a powerful impact on her design work, Busche reviewed the work of neuroscientists, psychologists and others who have explored the possible connections. A couple of these findings bear repeating for those of us—everyone really—who struggles to “open up” their thinking and unlock their imaginations every day.

It may seem obvious, but incorporating drawing early on in your problem solving will have the greatest impact. When you’re inviting others to think through the problem you’ve drawn, creative beginnings may be enhanced even further when key limitations (like a product’s dimensions, or a service’s current cost) are specified. Then, like a thought balloon, the visualizations you’re sketching out are tethered to earth by one or two basic presumptions.

Another key take-away is that drawing your way to new possibilities improves with practice. Busche is particularly eloquent on this point.

What happens when you continually draw and connect symbols as you sketch? What happens when your brain tries to recall shapes that are appropriate to the idea you are trying to externalize? It isn’t hard to see that the better you become at translating imagery from your mind to paper, the more visual resources you will have to draw on and the easier it will be to retrieve them in the future. . . Hand-sketching forces you to access and cultivate a unique visual library in your mind.

Modern life is increasingly automated. Aside from dexterity on a keyboard or touchpad, our cultivation of manual skills (beyond eating, cleaning, driving and maybe playing a sport) is limited.  We look at things or listen to them, often passively, instead of changing them or making them.

Our hands can help us to transform old thoughts into new ones. We know how to use them. They’re right in front of you, waiting to be used.

It may be time to start drawing again.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Continuous Learning, Daily Preparation, Entrepreneurship, Work & Life Rewards Tagged With: collaboration, innovation, open source, problem solving, visualization

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